The first initial spike was the first adapter flood, then you can see that most of them cashed out, fast, the dismal payouts next were from reluctant whales who controlled the payout because of the curve n2 placed on vests vs linear as we have now, and that next steady and sudden climb was when the whale experiment was ran, basically whales had formed a majority who vowed to not vote and/or to downvote all other non compliant whales (and orcas, and some dolphins might have been involved) which increased the dolphins and minnows votes by about 10x. The whale experiment stopped more or less in June, where you see that dip, which was right around the time that the excitement of the whale experiment, meant to last only a couple of weeks, carried out into people going out there and getting linear passed. https://steemit.com/steemit/@sflaherty/know-your-voting-power-because-hard-fork-19-comes-tomorrow

With linear passed we were riding high, look at the difference, we haven't gotten there since, bar the spikes from the influx of people who had heard or learned about us because the price went crazy, not even 3 months after the HF. We gotten over the crazy circle jerks and bidbots yet having unleashed free downvoting has pretty much guaranteed that those exciting times when people were thinking "anything is possible" or "so much opportunity" on here will never manifest again, and instead with authors dwindling and posts and comments numbers which are largely driven by spam its pretty much cemented the notion that this place has seen it's Glory days, but do continue living in "to the moon", I'm sure hypemaster extraordinaire and the kp team will concur that this is just a lul before the next event. Hf26! Yay!